THIS sci-fi romp shoots for the stars with its highly impressive special effects combined with thrilling action and fantastic turns by a brilliant cast.

IF you thought Avengers Assemble was the ultimate comic book hero mash-up, wait until you get a load of this.

Marvel’s new sci-fi fantasy is a near-perfect mix of action, humour, imagination and wondrous special effects. Most of all, it is great fun.

As far as this summer’s blockbusters go, nothing so far has come close and calling Guardians the new millennium’s answer to Star Wars really isn’t an exaggeration.

The film’s unlikely hero is Quill (Chris Pratt), an eccentric gunfighter in the Han Solo mould who we meet stealing a metal orb coveted by the evil warlord Ronan.

When he dispatches his top assassin, the green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana), to recover the artefact, the pair find themselves locked up, along with the galaxy’s most unlikely bounty hunters, namely a gun-toting raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and his sidekick (Vin Diesel), who just so happens to be a walking tree.

Joining forces with a two-tone inmate, the adventurers find themselves the subject of an intergalactic manhunt.

Much of the film’s charm lies in its droll, often surreal sense of humour.

While Quill is the film’s hero, he’s also a bit of a plonker and engages in laser combat while listening to disco tunes on his Sony Walkman.

It’s the same sort of anarchic fun we saw in Hellboy or the Firefly TV series. The effects are even more impressive, as the ragtag band of heroes fly from one beautifully rendered planet to the next.

There are spectacular dogfights between spaceships and an impressive final face-off that makes this a film that needs to be seen in 3D.

But what really sets Guardians apart from your standard blockbuster is the imagination that’s gone into it.

Much like the Star Wars city of Mos Eisley, the planets contain a dizzying array of alien life forms while, in an inspired move, one sequence takes part in the giant, disembodied head of a celestial being, now floating through space.